There are two major Neo-Confederate organizations: the Council of Conservative Citizens and the League of the South. They both have their own periodicals, publications, and websites. The League of the South has about 8,000 members, and the Sunday London Telegraph said last January that it was the fastest growing political group in the South. I have not heard figures for the Council of Conservative Citizens, but I estimate that it is as large or probably much larger. The Southern Partisan is a magazine, not an organization, but it is the leading publication of the movement and goes back to 1979.

CA: Why should we worry about these organizations? Aren't they just a fringe element with no power to affect the mainstream?

ES: Trent Lott, U.S. Senate Republican Majority Leader is a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens and has a regular column in their newspaper the "Citizen Informer." Congressman Ron Paul of Texas went and spoke at a secession conference sponsored by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Bill Murchison, columnist for the Dallas Morning News, is a leading Neo-Confederate and member of the League of the South. H.W. Crocker, editor of the Conservative Book Club, the one that has full-page ads in the magazines, is a regular and major contributor to Southern Partisan. League of the South member Donald Livingston had his new book on secession published by the University of Chicago Press. Charley Reese, nationally syndicated columnist, is a member of the League of the South. Pat Buchanan is a senior advisor for the Southern Partisan .

Some say that everything good in the South is vanishing and everything bad is spreading nationwide. One growing trend in America is neo-Confederate culture, which encompasses history, literature, museums, reenactments, monuments, battlefields, and organizations dedicated to the principles and founders of the Confederate States of America. Neo-Confederacy intersects with white supremacy, the Christian Right, the Populist Party, and the states' rights movement. To an increasingly diverse set of Americans, neo-Confederate culture supplies a regionally- and historically-grounded message of right-wing righteousness and urgency.